Slashdot Mirror
10 Years of Intel Processors Compared
jjslash writes to Techspot's interesting look back at the evolution of Intel CPUs since the original Core 2 Duo E6600 and Core 2 Quad processors were introduced. The test pits the eight-year-old CPUs against their successors in the Nehalem, Sandy Bridge and Haswell families, including today's Celeron and Pentium parts which fare comparably well. A great reference just days before Intel's new Skylake processor debuts.
I was hoping to see an article discussing the changes in architecture and how the improvements have been made, not just regurgiting lists of bench marks
It wouldn't be a meaningful test then, would it? Hey let's race these cars, but since the old ones don't have turbos, let's disable the turbos in the new ones too.
Because a lot of programs don't use those features because they are compiled to run on a wide variety of hardware.
If you buy a highend Haswell CPU, they're faster than the first generation by enough to make it matter. Anything newer and you're actually slowing down. Intel's new strategy is to make slower CPUs with faster graphics and lower power consumption.
One thing I found when speccing a new computer was single thread performance. Properly designed intense workloads will multithread (even video encoding), but for day to day use, it's usually one thread that's bogging down the system. AMD in particular pushes for multithread performance at the expense of single thread performance. For Intel, i7 Haswell chips do great at multithreading, but only slightly better at single threaded performance than i5 Haswells, for substantially more cost. Since I don't game, I went with a higher end i5.
And how many of those programs are computing intensive? And how many of the computing intensive ones don't use libraries for some or all of the intensive parts? A lot of of software that is cpu bound got the message years ago that there are newer technologies and it is worth having more than one code path to take advantage of newer cpus or gpus or using a library that does that for you.